nights Quotes

The kids spend their nights at the Colonel’s pool, the neighbors disapprove of their family for this among other things, which doesn’t’ make a new family feel better at all. Their mother died and with her, the normalcy of their family died. Retta, the eldest, has tried her best to replace their mother, but Johnny, the middle child, is fed up with Retta.

“How could I doubt such a miracle? Isn’t it a miracle that the sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west? Isn’t there mystery in all of nature’s wonders? In the movements of the moon or the stillness of the stars?”

“Now that she knew where the prince lived, the little mermaid spent many evenings and nights looking at the splendid palace. She swam nearer to the land than any of her sisters had dared. There was a marble balcony that cast its shadow across a narrow canal, and beneath it, she hid and watched the young prince.”

“Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he heard a racket in the night and shouted, ‘Quiet down there!’ and fell through the dark, out his clothes, past the moon & his mama & papa sleeping tight into the light of the night kitchen?”

“I can’t go to sleep. The music’s turned up and the arguments have started. There’s something funny about the night that makes grown-ups go stupid and call each other names. Maybe it’s their way of scaring off the Hairyman. Maybe it’s just the grog in them.”

At the end, Pedro’s composition is revealed through his parents reading it. He describes a very boring, and blatantly false story of what his family does at night.

“And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.”

Many, many days and nights passed. The three trees nearly forgot their dreams. But one night golden starlight poured over the first tree as a young woman placed her newborn baby in the feed box.”

“Night loneliness was always bad when the younger children had gone to bed, or when the father was not in the cabin. ‘Night loneliness is part fearing,’ the boy’s mother had once said to him.”